Instrumentation Distrobox 1.6 has been published, offering users the ability to quickly install and start any Linux distribution in a container and ensure seamless integration with the main system. The project utilizes Shell as the code language and is distributed under the gplv3 license.
The project provides a layer over Docker, Podman, or Lilipod, aiming to simplify the work process and integrate the isolated environment with the rest of the system. Users can create an environment with another distribution easily, by executing a single Distrobox-Create command, without the need to consider any complexities. Once launched, Distrobox grants the container access to the user’s home directory, sets up access to the X11 and Wayland servers for running graphic applications from within the container, enables the connection of external drives, adds sound output, and provides integration at the SSH agent level, d-Bus, and UDEV.
Distrobox supports the use of 25 distributions as the host system, including Alpine, Manjaro, Gentoo, Endlessos, NIXOS, VOID, Arch, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Rhel, and Fedora. Users can launch any distribution for which OCI format images are available. Upon installation, users can effectively work within another distribution without leaving the main system.
Main areas of application include experimenting with atomic updated distributions, such as Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, Opensuse Microos, and Steamos3. Furthermore, users can create individual isolated environments for running home-made configurations on working laptops or testing experimental branches of distributions.
In the latest release:
- Added tools for controlling isolated containers with the lilipod package, which is developed by the same author of Distrobox. This toolkit allows users to load and unpack container images in OCI format from various repositories, as well as control the images and create and launch containers from the received images. The lilipod command line interface closely resembles Podman,